CHINA 1. Let’s have some background on the Chinese 9-dashed line in the South China Sea.

I do not know the details about South China Sea claims, but most Westerners only have media claims that are intentionally vague. I present only what seems obvious, and you can make up your own mind.

(5,000 words)

In 1946 Chiang Kai-shek, aided by US warships, traveled all over the SCS. They not only recorded all the islands/rocks with a Chinese name, but they were garrisoned on Taiping, the only island that is habitable. In 1947 there were only two nation states in the region, the ROC (Taiwan) and the Philippines—and the rest were all still colonies of Western powers. As Tan (2016) points out, none of the colonial powers like Spain, the US, Britain, Holland or France disputed China’s sovereignty over the Pratas, Paracel and Spratly islands, or the Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Dao) territories.

Introduction

The rise of China on, or the return of China to, the international stage is a phenomenon of unprecedented significance that induces anxiety and even fear globally. In the words of one seasoned China specialist, “the reality is that China, in a different way to any other country in the world, is the most alien to a world largely Westernized for hundreds of years, and thus its “threat” is bigger than that of Russia (part of European history since its birth) or Islam, also part of Mediterranean history since its birth. China exists on another dimension that was put off for years and now simply won’t go away” (Sisci 2016).

It is under these circumstances that a Chinese naval vessel shadowing the USNS Bowditch in the SCS recovered an oceanographic glider that had been launched by the US ship. The devices used by the US Navy were supposed to collect scientific data, such as salinity, temperature and current flow. The incident occurred about 70 nautical miles off Subic Bay, well within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Philippines. While the Chinese vessel’s recovery of the drone was supposedly unlawful according to Bateman (2016), the legality of the research activities by the USNS Bowditch are also open to question. Marine scientific research in an EEZ is under the jurisdiction of the coastal state and should only be undertaken with their approval. It’s unlikely that approval for this research was even sought from, or given by the Philippines.

With the unexpected 2016 election victory of Donald Trump as the president of the US, the relationship between China and the US— arguably the most important international relationship in today’s world—has been dragged into uncharted territory. With a president who not only has no experience in politics and diplomacy, but also seems extremely wayward regarding norms and precedence, 2017 onwards was full of surprises, some of which proved to be nasty.

The PRC’s rejection of the Hague Tribunal ruling in 2016 that China’s claim of historical ownership of SCS waters within the dash lines is not valid, and said that all the physical features above water within the area are not islands, but rocks that are uninhabitable. It’s is predictable. But why did the issue flare up in 2016? As Hyer (2015) makes clear, PRC claim over the SCS is not PRC expansionism or China becoming more aggressive when it has already become economically and militarily powerful. The Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared the sovereignty of the PRC over the South China Sea as far back as in August 1951, inheriting previous claims from the ROC, (Republic of China, 1912 to 1949, then retreated to Taiwan). In fact, the acceleration of tensions that led to the Hague ruling had much to do with international geopolitics in general and the US’s “Pivot to Asia” in particular.

The south China sea

China occupied Woody Island (Yongxing Dao) in the Paracel group after the evacuation of Nationalist troops in 1950. In 1974 Chinese forces occupied the remaining islands in the Parcel group held by the collapsing South Vietnamese. All these claims and enforcement of them were in fact inherited from the ROC: in 1935 the Nationalist government’s China Map Verification Committee declared sovereignty over 132 islands, reefs and shoals in the SCS. In 1947 the committee published a map that included a U-shaped line (the eleven dashed line) encompassing the entire SCS. From the Chinese point of view, as Hyer quotes the Chinese position from a scholar Chen Jie: “Initially taking advantage of China’s turbulent domestic policies and its preoccupation with superpower threats, regional countries have occupied China’s islands and reefs, carved up its sea areas, and looted its marine recourses. Beijing does not view establishing a foothold in the South China Sea as constituting territorial gains but minimizing territorial losses” (Hyer 2015: 240).

As Hyer convincingly shows, the SCS has become a hot spot for dispute not only because of the potentially rich energy resources, but because of the anxiety caused by the rise of China. From the late 1940s to the late 1970s when the Cold War was hot, the influence of the US on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other had maintained a sort of equilibrium in the area. However, with the end of the Vietnam War, the retreat of the Americans and the Russians seems to have left an opportunity for Chinese dominance that many fear. According to Hyer, in spite of the fact that the Chinese National Peoples’ Congress promulgated a “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone” in 1992, which asserted China’s claims on Dongsha (the Pratas), Xisha (the Paracel), Zhongsha (the Macclesfield Bank) and Nansha (the Spratly) islands, “it is unlikely that Beijing will block a settlement if other parties are all willing to compromise or participate in a joint development agreement while putting-off settlement of the sovereignty question” (Hyer 2015: 246), because “China’s vigilance is not unlike the behavior of the other disputants, however, and does not necessarily foreshadow aggressive action to assert control over all of the South China Sea” (2015: 250). Writing before the 2016 Hague Arbitration Ruling, Hyer argues that the fact that, “Following Deng Xiaoping’s decision to shelve the controversy and pursue cooperative development, China did not unilaterally pursue oil or other resource development in disputed areas of the South China Sea, whereas other states did, especially Malaysia and Vietnam” (2015: 252), is encouraging and “the voice of pragmatism won out. China has not elevated the SCS to a ‘core interest’” (2015: 255). Hyer seems in agreement with the veteran Fravel (2010) that as China has, and will take a compromise position between history and reality, a middle way between “axiomatic” and “calculated” policies (May 1962), “if nothing occurs to threaten Beijing’s security interests in the South China Sea, the status quo could continue indefinitely” (Hyer 2015: 259). But that is a big if.

What is the basis for the Chinese claims?

As Figure 2 shows, there are extensive overlapping claims over the physical features within the dash line, and the overlapping becomes more intensive around Spratly Island. What is the basis for the Chinese claims when the chart clearly shows that Spratly Island is so far away from China? As Austin (2016) points out, to the Chinese both Spratly and Parcel islands are Chinese territory that were stolen by Japan in a long and brutal war just months before Japan invaded Hainan Island in 1939. This core belief has nothing to do with the discovery of offshore oil, or even a conceptualization of “maritime expansion, the second island chain, the ‘one belt one road,’ or revision of world order, including law of the sea” (Austin 2016).

The Chinese point out that the Philippines’ claim to some of the Spratly Islands only arose between the mid to late 1970s when it enjoyed a strong military alliance with the US and when China was busy with its domestic politics. The Chinese believe their recent reclamations of and fortifications of the reefs they have occupied since the 1980s are the least they can do to protect their claims without resorting to evicting the Philippines by military force from the islands it has occupied. From the Chinese perspective they are exercising restraint. It is the US and its allies who want to escalate tension in the area. The US-Philippines joint military exercise, with the participation of Australian forces, in addition to two Japanese warships and a submarine that happened to be visiting the Philippines in a goodwill tour at the time, is, to the Chinese, provocative and a push for militarization.

Figure 2 Conflicting claims of the SCS

For other observers, “China’s claims, it seems, are as valid—if not more so—than many of the other claimant states” (Blaxland 2016). In fact, the Hague 2016 ruling has put the Taiwan authorities into a very difficult position, especially for the political fraction that pushes for Taiwanese independence. Under the Treaty of Peace, signed between Japan and the ROC on April 28, 1952, the Spratly and Parcel islands have been returned to the ROC, and by extension, China is the rightful owner, whichever China it might be, since the US, Japan, Australia and all ten countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations abide by the one-China policy: that Taiwan is a part of China. If Taiwan cuts itself off from China—not just from the ROC, but from even China in the abstract—it weakens its claim over the sovereignty of the SCS, a position that is hard to see as legitimate by the citizens of a nation state. Under such circumstances China is still willing to negotiate with each claimant in a peaceful manner. Michael Pascoe (2016) rightly asks this question: “Which came first: (a) the US ‘pivot to Asia’ (AKA ‘encircling China’) or (b) China increasing its forward defense stance in the South China Sea by building artificial islands?” The answer, according to Pascoe, is (a).

What seems to be ironic is that China’s claim of not wanting to militarize the area was used by the Hague Tribunal to deny China’s claim over sovereignty. Because China had repeatedly emphasized the non-military nature of its actions and had stated at the highest level that it would not militarize its presence in the Spratlys, China’s activities are deemed not to be military in nature. Accordingly, the tribunal concluded that Article 298 did not pose an obstacle to its jurisdiction of denying China’s sovereignty.

According to Article 298(b), disputes concerning military activities, including military activities by government vessels and aircraft engaged in non-commercial service, should be {excluded} from the jurisdiction of a court or tribunal under Article 297, paragraph 2 or 3. In other words, had China used military forces in the area the tribunal would not have the right to make a ruling.

The Vietnamese claims

When, on September 4, 1958 the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared that China’s decision regarding the 12 nautical miles of China’s territorial waters included the two archipelagos Paracel and Spratly, on September 14, 1958 Pham Van Dong representing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) sent a Diplomatic Note to China stating that:

We would like to inform you that the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has noted and (we) support the September 4, 1958 declaration by the People’s Republic of China regarding territorial waters of China. The government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam respects this decision and will direct the proper government agencies to respect absolutely the 12 nautical mile territorial waters of China in all dealings with the People’s Republic of China on the sea (Vietnamnet 2011).

Vietnam later tried to weaken that action by arguing that the diplomatic note was sent under complicated circumstances of war against Western colonialism and because North Vietnam then was supporting its “comrades” (Vietnamnet 2011). “Hanoi seems, at this time [1956], to have supported the claim of the Chinese People’s Republic” (Tønneson  2006: 52–3).

The Philippine claims

A reader’s response to Hugh White (2016) points out the problems with the claims by the Philippines:

Professor White’s assertion that allegedly “China seized Scarborough Shoals, which lie quite close to Manila, from the Philippines in 2012” is seriously flawed and thus has no merit. If he cares to revisit the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the 1900 Treaty of Washington and the 1930 Convention between the United States and Great Britain, he will discover that they described the western limit of the Philippine territory as 118 degrees East longitude. But as the map shows, China’s islands and reefs in the Spratly, Paracel, Pratas, Zhongsha, which include the Macclesfield bank and Huangyan Dao (Scarborough shoal) are all due West of that 118 degrees East longitude. It was President Ferdinand Marcos who annexed 8 features in the Spratly on 11 June 1978, using Presidential Decree 1596, under the pretext they were terra nullius, which had no basis under any law.

The international order and the SCS

To the Chinese, the whole episode of the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling on the SCS was the result of a US-designed and US-sponsored scheme to “pivot toward Asia,” targeting the rising China. Inexperienced in how to play the game, the rules of which have been set by Western powers, China did not want to participate in the process of the PCA in the first place: (a mistake on China’s part according to some experts.)

That the US is somehow behind the PCA (Permanent Court) is admitted by Michael McDevitt, senior fellow in strategic studies at the CNA Corporation, who states that the US has not only set the agenda of condemning China’s actions in the SCS but was also “indirectly” responsible for “Manila’s decision to go to the Permanent Court of Arbitration over Chinese claims and actions in the SCS” (McDevitt 2017), though he does not specify what “indirectly” means. In the words of Saches (2017), today’s China offers a rude awakening for Americans who believe that the US and the US alone should dominate the world.

Each time the US has had a rival for global leadership, they have aimed to eliminate the rivalry and to subordinate (subjugate), the rival to US power. The first example was with the former Soviet Union: pushing NATO eastwards toward Russian borders by incorporating the Eastern European and Baltic countries into the US-led military alliance, and then contemplating incorporating Ukraine and Georgia as well. The second example was its wars to overthrow, or try to overthrow, several antagonistic governments in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Starting with President Ronald Reagan, the US foreign policy establishment went to work to counter Japan. It began accusing Japan of unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, unfair state aid to Japan’s businesses and other exaggerated or flat-out false claims of nefarious behavior. The US began to impose new trade barriers and forced Japan to agree to “voluntary” export restraints to limit its booming exports to the US. Then, in 1985, the US struck harder, insisting that Japan massively revalue (strengthen) the yen in a manner that would leave Japan far less competitive with the US. The yen doubled in strength, from 260 yen per dollar in 1985 to 130 yen per dollar in 1990. Japan had been pushed by the US to price itself out of the world market. By the early 1990s, Japan’s export growth collapsed and Japan entered two decades of stagnation. On many occasions after 1990, Saches (2017) asked senior Japanese, “The Truth Behind Philippine’s Stance Over South China Sea Disputes,” People’s Daily, China @ PDChina officials, why Japan didn’t devalue the yen to restart growth. The most convincing answer was that the US wouldn’t allow Japan do it.

Now comes China. American primacists (America firsters), are beside themselves that China seems to have the audacity to poke its nose into “the American century.” Rather than let China catch up, the primacists say, the US should badger and harass China economically, engage the Chinese in a new arms race and even undermine the one China policy that has been the basis of US–China bilateral relations, so that China ends up in economic retreat, retracing the steps of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and Japan (Saches 2017).

Regarding the SCS dispute, Sourabh Gupta (2017a, 2017b) thinks the Hague ruling was “harsh” and “reckless” in its total condemnation of China, and that China has a case regarding its historical rights to the SCS islands (Gupta 2016). Gupta also argues that it is within China’s rights to construct artificial islands on the high-tide features that it administers in the SCS, as well as on those submerged features that lie within the territorial sea of a high-tide feature that it administers or claims. Such construction is not an “illegal taking of disputed international territories”—much less a violation of the undisputed territorial sovereignty of a neighboring state “akin to Russia’s taking [of] Crimea” (Gupta 2015).

A brief historical review

Like the land disputes that China had with its neighbors until the Western concept of the nation state was imposed by Western colonialism, China had no clear boundary claims over the SCS islands. Even until “the 1930s the dispute over the Spratlys and Paracels had been mainly a Franco-Japanese affair, with a weak and war-torn China as the third party. From 1945 to 1956 the main dispute had been between France on the one side and the two Chinese regimes on the other” (Tønneson, 2006: 48).

After the surrender of the Japanese to the allies at the end of World War II in 1946, the ROC soldiers led by Chiang Kai-shek, aided by US warships, traveled all over the SCS. They not only recorded all the islands/rocks with a Chinese name, but were garrisoned on Taiping, the only island that is habitable. That was when the eleven-dash line was drawn with the assistance of the US Navy. When the eleven-dash line claim was made and printed in an ROC map in 1947 there were only two nation states in the region, the ROC and the Philippines—and the rest were still colonies of Western powers. As Tan (2016) points out, none of the colonial powers like Spain, the US, Britain, Holland or France disputed China’s sovereignty over the Pratas, Paracel and Spratly islands, or the Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Dao) territories.

In the 1887 Sino-Franco Convention, France agreed that all the isles east of the treaty delimitation line were assigned to China. In the 1898 Treaty of Paris, signed when Spain handed the Philippines as a colony to the US, Article III described the western limit of the Philippines as 118 degrees east longitude. China’s claims are all located west of that point. The Philippines wanted to annex the Spratlys in 1933. On 20 August that year, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote that the islands of the Philippine group which the US acquired from Spain by the treaty of 1898, were only those within the limits described in Article III, 118 degrees east longitude, (Tian Shaohui 2016), and it may be observed that no mention has been found of Spain having exercised sovereignty over, or having laid claim to, any of these (Spratly) islands.

Note that the claim over the SCS by the PRC not only overlaps that made by the ROC, but is also narrower with a nine-dash line. Under such historically complex circumstances it is understandable that no matter how much the US wants to, it is hard for it to make a stand against China over the control of territory, or sovereignty over islets and rocks that generate rights over adjacent seas and sea beds. Instead, the US, its allies and the “international community” constantly tout the approach that the PRC’s claims and its assertive activities, such as creating artificial islands by digging and piling up sand, threatens freedom of navigation. But as pointed out by Freeman (2016), given the kind of commercial shipping in the SCS freedom of navigation has never been threatened or compromised there. In fact, China is the country that wants to maintain freedom of navigation the most, as it is the main sea route for ships to leave China.

In fact, China is not the first nor the only country that has been creating land by dredging sand in disputed area; Vietnam was creating artificial islands for years before China started and already has forces stationed on some of the islands it claims, but that are also claimed by both China and the Philippines. China is just catching up. Japan interfered with Taiwanese fishing in what Japan claims to be its EEZ, supposedly generated by its possession of Okinotorishima, originally a pair of mushroom-shaped rocks, of king-size bed dimensions, sticking a few meters above the water at high tide.

But Japan has built an 8,000 square meter platform on top of them to claim 400,000 square kilometers of EEZ—!!! An impressive engineering feat that didn’t make the front pages in the Western media (Clemens Stubbe Oestergaard 2016, personal communication).

As the insider China observer Sydney Rittenberg (2016, personal communication) points out, China is not making new claims but enforcing claims that have long been in existence. Rittenberg argues that the Hague ruling on China’s sovereignty claims is not a legally binding document, but an opinion. Reading statements from US “Secretary Ash Carter and Admiral Harry Harris … what really sticks in their craw is the diminishing, and probable loss, of US dominance in that part of the Pacific, not issues of sovereignty” (Rittenberg 2016, personal communication). ✓It is the US that has stoked tensions by giving other nations around China the backing they need to aggressively pursue territorial interests. ✓It is the US that has maintained military bases and assets with nuclear strike capacity within range of Chinese civilian centers. ✓It is the US that has initiated a “pivot to Asia” whereby 60 percent of US naval and aerial units will be positioned in the Asia Pacific theater by the end of the decade.

This kind of double standard by the “international community” can only be understood in terms of the geopolitics of US dominance in Asia and the Western dominance of the world. Underlying the geopolitics of Western dominance, is the fear of China, whether it’s the “yellow peril” fear of China during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century when there was a White Australian policy (Gao 2017), or exclusion of the Chinese in the US and Canada, or the “red under the bed” during the second half of the twentieth century, or the rise of China during the twenty-first century. The fear has always been there when China has been seen as different; whether the difference is conceptualized racially, culturally or politically.

But is the fear justified? As evidence from the rigorous research by Maxwell (2014) and Hyer (2015), China has always been ready to make tactical concessions. This is confirmed and clearly stated by Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (2017), a former US ambassador to China, in his comment on current situation:

“China waited a decade to respond to multiple seizures of disputed islands and reefs in the South China Sea by other claimants.” The Philippines began the process of creating facts in the sea in 1978, Vietnam followed in 1982, and Malaysia did the same in 1983. In 1988, China intervened to halt the further expansion of Vietnamese holdings. Since then, China has established an un-ejectable presence of its own on seven artificially enlarged land features in the South China Sea. It has not attempted to dislodge other claimants from any of the four dozen outposts they have planted in Chinese-claimed territories. China has been careful not to provoke military confrontations with them or with the U.S. Navy, despite the latter’s swaggering assertiveness. A similar pattern of restraint has been evident in the Senkaku Islands, (with Japan) which China considers to be part of Taiwan and Japan asserts are part of Okinawa.

There, China seeks to present an active challenge to Japanese efforts to foreclose discussion of the two sides’ dispute over sovereignty. It has done so with lightly armed Coast Guard vessels rather than with the PLA’s naval warfare arm. Japan has been equally cautious. China negotiated the reunification of both Hong Kong and Macau, although it could have used force, as India did in Goa, to achieve reintegration. China has negotiated generous settlements and demarcations of its land borders with Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. China’s borders with the former British empire in Bhutan, India, and Myanmar remain unsettled formally but for the most part peaceful.

The Hague ruling and Taiwan’s conundrum

Regarding the 2016 Hague Ruling, Wang Jiangyu argues that “While the Tribunal’s own legitimacy seems to be unquestionable, whether it had jurisdiction over the dispute is debatable. It’s likely it has, but China’s certain arguments against the jurisdiction are worthy of discussion. However, the final award’s interpretation and application of certain provisions of UNCLOS [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea] are problematic and possibly erroneous” (Wang Jiangyu 2017: 185).

It is important to point out the sovereignty exception to the compulsory dispute settlement of UNCLOS. That is, it is widely agreed that the convention does not govern sovereignty-related issues. Accordingly, the questions of sovereignty and related rights over land territory are outside the subject matter of an UNCLOS court or tribunal (Wang Jiangyu 2017: 190).

China’s claim over the SCS is indicated by its declared nine-dash line on its map. But officially, China has never made it clear what it wants by maintaining the nine-dash line. There are three possible interpretations of China’s nine-dash line claim: (1) the nine-dash line aims only to indicate the lands over which China claims sovereignty, (2) the nine-dash line is intended to be a national boundary between China and its neighbors and (3) the nine-dash line is intended to indicate China’s historic claim.

While China keeps a strategic “ambiguity” without official clarification, “It can then be reasonably concluded that the nine-dash line represents China’s claims over all the lands within the line, plus historic rights within the nine-dash line—under Article 14 of its 1998 law on the EEZ and the continental shelf—in respect of fishing, navigation, and exploration and exploitation of resources” (Wang Jiangyu 2017: 203).

From the point of view of Taiwan, the Hague ruling on the ROC’s (Taiwan’s) Taiping Island as a “rock”, “unfortunately” damages the whole ruling and puts Taiwan in a very difficult position: China’s SCS claims are primarily derived from the ROC’s assertions over the years. As Freeman (2015) narrates:

In 1945, in accordance with the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations and with American help, the armed forces of the ROC government at Nanjing accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrisons in Taiwan, including the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Nanjing then declared both archipelagos to be part of Guangdong Province. In 1946 it established garrisons on both Woody (Yongxing) Island in the Paracels and Taiping Island in the Spratlys.

As one reader’s response to Freeman says:

In practice, as some in the region recall, long before the United States turned against them as part of its “pivot to Asia” in 2010, America had supported China’s claims in the Paracels and Spratlys. The U.S. Navy facilitated China’s replacement of Japan’s military presence in both island groups in 1945 because it considered that they were either part of Taiwan, as Japan had declared, or—in the words of the Cairo Declaration—among other “territories Japan [had] stolen from the Chinese” to “be restored to the Republic of China.” From 1969 to 1971, the United States operated a radar station in the Spratlys at Taiping Island, under the flag of the Republic of China.

Clearly Taiwan’s adherence to its SCS claims strengthens China’s legal position. Even worse for the Taiwan independence advocates, Taiwan’s claim over the SCS islands, just like its claim over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, reinforces the one China narrative. In other words, Taiwan’s claims over these islands weakens its position of a separate sovereignty. This is a huge conundrum for Taiwan’s aspiration of independence: Taiwan cannot afford to abandon its long-held claim over these islands because the very legitimacy of a sovereignty is to protect its territory. That is why the independence-advocating Democratic Progressive Party government under Tsai Yin-wen had to defend its sovereignty over the islands it occupies by rejecting the UNCLOS ruling. But by doing so it places itself firmly into the one China framework.

Conclusion: the politically correct construction of China over the south China sea issue

By citing evidence from think tanks like the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and Australia’s Lowy Institute, and media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart and the Washington Times, Valencia (2017) points out that Western think tanks tend to exaggerate the China threat in order to get the Trump administration to construct a China that presents an imminent risk to US national interests. According to Valencia, “academic analysts themselves push US-slanted research,” and the figure of more than US $5 trillion in trade that transits the SCS is cited as evidence of China’s claim over the SCS threatening international trade while not to pointing out that most of the $5 trillion trade goes to China. Valencia is right in observing that the Western media follow the US’s clever conflation of freedom of commercial navigation with the freedom to undertake provocative military intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activities. The media constructing of China over the issue of SCS is not just (mis)constructing, as Valencia titles his paper. In fact, this is a consistent practice in the politically-correct construction of China on the basis of geopolitics, and from the point of view of the perceived Western national interest. As also pointed out by Valencia, the Western media uses legal ambiguities to evade a regime governed by scientific consent while choosing not to point out the fact that the ocean is for peaceful purposes as required by UNCLOS, and that intrusive and controversial practices threatening the use of force is prohibited by the UN charter. But to justify aggressiveness against China one has to construct an aggressive China.

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